Who has the right to determine how Scotland votes?
There’s plenty of comment elsewhere in the blogosphere on David Cameron’s first serious intervention in the Scottish referendum debate, some of it very good indeed. So there’s no need to labour any of those points.
Perhaps more interesting is who is and who isn’t correct on both the technicalities and the ethics of how Scotland might declare independence. The Secretary of State for Scotland will make a statement in the House of Commons tomorrow, setting out the UK government’s position on the matter. In the media battle, spokespeople on both sides are inclined to make statements more aimed at propagandising the public than dispassionately informing them.
As far as the core issue goes, David Cameron is correct in strict constitutional terms. Under the Scotland Act 1998, devolution is a ‘generally reserved’ matter, and therefore entirely the purview of the government at Westminster. In strict legal terms, Cameron is entirely justified in holding a referendum on any basis his coalition agrees to at any time he wishes, and is equally justified in not holding one.
In practice, Cameron is constrained by the myriad understandings and unspoken conventions that underpin the constitutional framework of the UK. One of these, for as long as I’ve been around, is that if the SNP or other Nationalists ever got a majority of Scottish seats in the UK House of Commons, or a majority in the Scottish Parliament, a referendum on Scottish independence would be held in due course and without undue delay.
The SNP fought the last Scottish Parliamentary election with a specific manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on independence, and won an overall majority of seats on that basis. Denying the Scottish people a referendum on independence in that context would be a major assault on democracy, would provoke a major constitutional crisis with implications beyond Scotland and, unsurprisingly, no-one with any power is talking in those terms. Let’s kill that red herring. The referendum is going to happen and everybody who matters agrees it should.
However, things get a bit more slippery when we start talking about who should dictate the terms under which such a referendum should be held. The SNP have been claiming all day that people elected a government ‘committed to a referendum in the second half of this [Scottish] Parliament'. The problem is, regardless of what SNP spokespeople may have said on chatshows and opinion pages last year, they didn’t say this in their manifesto. The manifesto simply says:
“We think the people of Scotland should decide our nation’s future in a democratic referendum and opinion polls suggest that most Scots agree. We will, therefore, bring forward our Referendum Bill in this next Parliament.”
There is no mention of timing, multiple options or content. None. The Scottish people did not vote last May for what the SNP claims it did, and it is simply mendacious to pretend that they did. Government by chatshow is not democracy. The present administration in Edinburgh has neither the moral nor the constitutional authority to set the terms of the referendum without the consent of the UK government and, I would argue, without a large degree of consensus with the opposition parties in Holyrood.
It underscores the slipperiness that has characterised almost all of the SNP’s handling of the referendum procedure - deliberately evasive on timing, deliberately evasive on content, deliberately evasive on alternatives to independence, and crushingly arrogant and dismissive when anyone else expresses a view on any of those subjects. It leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth, and I’m far from unsympathetic to either the SNP as a party or the idea of Scottish independence.
Cameron’s intervention may or may not have been politically sensible. Indeed, it probably wasn’t; I found his interventions on Northern Ireland during the Bizarre UCUNF Saga irritating and ill-informed. He and his party remain toxic in Scotland. But as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom he does have a legitimate interest in the terms of a Scottish referendum, not least as a majority of Scots at both the 2010 UK and 2011 Scottish general elections voted for pro-union parties. If Alec Salmond wanted more control over the terms of a referendum, he should have asked for more control from the Scottish people last year - i.e. he should have displayed a few more cojones in the text of his manifesto. He didn’t.
We now have two possible ways forward. Firstly, the Scottish and UK governments can sit down like grown ups and rationally negotiate the terms of the Referendum, ideally with the Scottish and UK Labour Parties and the Scottish Tories, LibDems and Greens fully involved. For those of us who think the right of the people to choose their form of government, in and of itself, is the most important question at stake in the referendum, that makes a lot of sense.
The second option is for a long period of megaphone diplomacy between London and Edinburgh where Cameron effectively accuses Salmond of dictatorial tendencies, and Salmond accuses Cameron of being a toff English colonialist. From the reaction today, many in the SNP think there are many ‘Yes’ votes to be gained through a lengthy and bitter cross-border spat. So I think that’s what we’ll get, at least until the Scottish Labour Party regains its bearings, or some credible non-party ‘No’ campaign leadership emerges. We could be waiting a while.
But there will be some sort of credible 'No' campaign in place long before polling day, so I’m not sure that makes strategic sense for the SNP in the long term. But its an easy, enjoyable and probably effective tactic in short-term, so I think that’s what we’ll see. Athenian democracy it ain't.
Perhaps more interesting is who is and who isn’t correct on both the technicalities and the ethics of how Scotland might declare independence. The Secretary of State for Scotland will make a statement in the House of Commons tomorrow, setting out the UK government’s position on the matter. In the media battle, spokespeople on both sides are inclined to make statements more aimed at propagandising the public than dispassionately informing them.
As far as the core issue goes, David Cameron is correct in strict constitutional terms. Under the Scotland Act 1998, devolution is a ‘generally reserved’ matter, and therefore entirely the purview of the government at Westminster. In strict legal terms, Cameron is entirely justified in holding a referendum on any basis his coalition agrees to at any time he wishes, and is equally justified in not holding one.
In practice, Cameron is constrained by the myriad understandings and unspoken conventions that underpin the constitutional framework of the UK. One of these, for as long as I’ve been around, is that if the SNP or other Nationalists ever got a majority of Scottish seats in the UK House of Commons, or a majority in the Scottish Parliament, a referendum on Scottish independence would be held in due course and without undue delay.
The SNP fought the last Scottish Parliamentary election with a specific manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on independence, and won an overall majority of seats on that basis. Denying the Scottish people a referendum on independence in that context would be a major assault on democracy, would provoke a major constitutional crisis with implications beyond Scotland and, unsurprisingly, no-one with any power is talking in those terms. Let’s kill that red herring. The referendum is going to happen and everybody who matters agrees it should.
However, things get a bit more slippery when we start talking about who should dictate the terms under which such a referendum should be held. The SNP have been claiming all day that people elected a government ‘committed to a referendum in the second half of this [Scottish] Parliament'. The problem is, regardless of what SNP spokespeople may have said on chatshows and opinion pages last year, they didn’t say this in their manifesto. The manifesto simply says:
“We think the people of Scotland should decide our nation’s future in a democratic referendum and opinion polls suggest that most Scots agree. We will, therefore, bring forward our Referendum Bill in this next Parliament.”
There is no mention of timing, multiple options or content. None. The Scottish people did not vote last May for what the SNP claims it did, and it is simply mendacious to pretend that they did. Government by chatshow is not democracy. The present administration in Edinburgh has neither the moral nor the constitutional authority to set the terms of the referendum without the consent of the UK government and, I would argue, without a large degree of consensus with the opposition parties in Holyrood.
It underscores the slipperiness that has characterised almost all of the SNP’s handling of the referendum procedure - deliberately evasive on timing, deliberately evasive on content, deliberately evasive on alternatives to independence, and crushingly arrogant and dismissive when anyone else expresses a view on any of those subjects. It leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth, and I’m far from unsympathetic to either the SNP as a party or the idea of Scottish independence.
Cameron’s intervention may or may not have been politically sensible. Indeed, it probably wasn’t; I found his interventions on Northern Ireland during the Bizarre UCUNF Saga irritating and ill-informed. He and his party remain toxic in Scotland. But as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom he does have a legitimate interest in the terms of a Scottish referendum, not least as a majority of Scots at both the 2010 UK and 2011 Scottish general elections voted for pro-union parties. If Alec Salmond wanted more control over the terms of a referendum, he should have asked for more control from the Scottish people last year - i.e. he should have displayed a few more cojones in the text of his manifesto. He didn’t.
We now have two possible ways forward. Firstly, the Scottish and UK governments can sit down like grown ups and rationally negotiate the terms of the Referendum, ideally with the Scottish and UK Labour Parties and the Scottish Tories, LibDems and Greens fully involved. For those of us who think the right of the people to choose their form of government, in and of itself, is the most important question at stake in the referendum, that makes a lot of sense.
The second option is for a long period of megaphone diplomacy between London and Edinburgh where Cameron effectively accuses Salmond of dictatorial tendencies, and Salmond accuses Cameron of being a toff English colonialist. From the reaction today, many in the SNP think there are many ‘Yes’ votes to be gained through a lengthy and bitter cross-border spat. So I think that’s what we’ll get, at least until the Scottish Labour Party regains its bearings, or some credible non-party ‘No’ campaign leadership emerges. We could be waiting a while.
But there will be some sort of credible 'No' campaign in place long before polling day, so I’m not sure that makes strategic sense for the SNP in the long term. But its an easy, enjoyable and probably effective tactic in short-term, so I think that’s what we’ll see. Athenian democracy it ain't.